Forever never ends

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Chester sat on his porch and watched the government trucks and research vans and men in foil suits crawling over his property. He didn't reckon their fancy meters and screens and snoop dishes would turn up much hard scientific evidence. All that was left was a damned hole in the ground. Everything else the alien had touched had flaked off and disappeared. Still, Chester knew the goddamned government liked to make a big show when it got the chance.

They'd tried to evict him and declare his farm a disaster area, but he told them in no uncertain terms that he wasn't leaving, that they'd have to send up a tank and roll over his ass before he would get out of his rocking chair. They could dig in the dirt and scrape the trees and bottle up creek water all they wanted, but Chester wasn't going to set foot outside his property for at least a couple more weeks. He just wanted to rock and stare off into space and forget.

Alien invasions were rough on an old-timer.

He lifted his moonshine to his cracked lips. He still had a few jars of Don Oscar's finest stowed away in the pantry, but soon he'd have to find a new bootlegger. He was going to miss Don Oscar.

His puppy sat at his feet, grinning around some wet leather. The little guy wasn't Boomer, but Chester figured one droopy-eared gasbag hound was the same as another. Chester had let him have Junior's abandoned footwear to gnaw on, to get his young gums toughened up.

The telephone rang. Chester had moved it out on the porch in case Tamara called. He liked the sound of her voice, especially when it was outside his head.

"Yuh-ello," he said.

"Chester. It's Emerland. Listen. Four million, how about that?"

"I told you the first ten times, no sale. Ain't changing my mind."

Emerland had broken both legs when a tree had fallen on him during the explosion. It had taken Tamara and Chester half the morning to carry him out, with him bitching and griping and threatening to sue every step of the way. Now the greedy bastard continually rang Chester from his hospital room, upping the ante.

"Dammit, Chester," Emerland said. "Can you imagine the publicity this is going to get as soon as the story leaks? Do you know just how much cash Alienworld will rake in after I get a theme park up and running? Can you just imagine? "

"No, Mister Plaster Pants. Ain't never had much imagination. Just gets a feller in trouble, as far as I can see.”

"Okay, four and a quarter, you old bastard. With residuals. You know, a stake in the profits.”

Maybe Chester could part with the place for five mil. It was only his birthright. Only dirt and weedy fields and falling-ass-down buildings and memories, and not all the memories were good. Every man had a price. But having Emerland swinging in the breeze was almost as much fun as a shitpile of money.

"Don't reckon so. Bye, now.”

"But, Chester — "

Chester hung up. He wanted the line free in case Tamara called. Of course, for a while there, she hadn't needed a phone. She just spoke right into his head.

And that was creepy as hell, but kind of natural once you got the hang of it. Except her "powers," as she called them, were fading, growing weaker day by day. So she'd started keeping in touch by phone. And that was okay, too.

He looked up at the thick white clouds, good solid April clouds a body could stick a pitchfork in and twirl around like cotton candy. He wondered if DeWalt was up there, part of the clouds, part of the sky.

The government men had taken his chickens. He didn't mind the least little bit. Fewer mouths to feed. He flexed his drinking arm.

He spat toward the yard but came up short. His porch had a new stain.

James was cleaning out Aunt Mayzie's things, packing them so his mother and her family could decide how to divide them up. With the funeral so fresh in everybody's mind, it wasn't a good time to dwell on material things. Still, Mom would want the saltshaker collection. She liked little knickknacks.

James looked at Aunt Mayzie's chair. A depression in the vinyl seat cushion made it look as if her ghost were sitting there. James sat in the ghost's lap and opened the coffee table drawer. It was full of dog-eared spiral notebooks and curling legal pads.

He pulled a notebook off the top and opened it. It was Mayzie's handwriting. He read the first page. FOR JAMES: SNOW ON FLOWERS

On hyacinth winds,

April walks a barefoot whisper across tilted fields

At the shore of warm green seas, she sneezes and mourns the coming of the hummingbirds and counts the tides with watered eyes as butterflies cut yellow trails

Her ice blue heart melts under the volcano-glass stare of the far fallen sun she glistens with reluctance

As night again collects its threads she breathes the mint of cooling hope and pulls the fabric, winters past, across her moondark skin

In dreams she cries the dew.

Poetry. Hundreds and hundreds of pages of poetry. And she'd never told him. He read some more, his heart pounding with excitement. Some of it was good enough to be published, as far as he could tell. Certainly better than some of the stuff he’d read in college textbooks.

Aunt Mayzie must have been writing for years, if not decades. And she'd never said a word. Here was her life, in a million syllables and fragments and broken thoughts and taped-over rips and smeary eraser marks. The symbols of her soul. He wondered if she would mind if he mailed some of it off. He had a few literary contacts from his days at Georgetown.

Maybe he could repay her in this way, by showing her work to the world. It was the least he could do. He was starting to come to terms with his guilt. Maybe he hadn't failed her. Maybe she had just been ready to go home to Uncle Theo and Oliver.

And maybe he'd stay in Windshake a while. He'd met Sarah on the street, when the press and the scientists and the National Guard had stirred up the town and started combing through the wreckage, trying to catch some of the drying flakes of the dead. He wouldn't mind getting to know Sarah a little better, and she'd had her own losses. Maybe they could need somebody together.

And besides, the place needed a town nig-no, make that an African-American. Or maybe just another human being.

Dignity wasn't a gift given by others, and there was no easy ticket into utopia. Dignity came with consciousness and breath. Compassion was more important than life or death, or those terrible states of existence in between. And utopia had its own problems.

In that one glimpse of shu-shaaa, he’d seen both the beauty and the emptiness of cosmic union. When all was one, there were never two.

He read the rest of Mayzie's poetry.

Bill looked out over the meadows at the foot of Fool's Knob, at the Lord's great natural work. He could almost imagine the pressed place in the grass where he and Nettie had joined in the flesh.

He still had his memories, even if they were starting to fade with the passing of time. The bad memories had fallen away, the sharp edges of nightmare had dulled, the old pains were dead and buried.

But the good ones faded, too, and that made him sad. He could barely picture Nettie's eyes. He knew they were dark brown and deep, but he couldn't quite recollect how they made crescents when she smiled. He didn't remember her voice clearly, even now, here in the field with the sparrows making their songs and the breeze tickling the jack pines. He had to breathe deeply and swell his chest to catch a faint reminder of the smell of her skin.

But they would be meeting in the sweet bye-and-bye. It was just a matter of being patient until the Lord willed him home. He only wished he could have given Nettie a good Christian burial. But she had dissolved like the others.

He couldn't bury her flesh, and her soul was far gone to a better place.

He hollowed out a depression in the damp soil with his fingers, scratching at the roots of clover and dandelions. He picked a buttercup and laid it gently in the shallow grave and pressed the dirt over the bright yellow petals.

Tomorrow was Easter, a day of rebirth. But today was just another day spent sealed inside a dark cave, waiting.

He knelt in the grass and prayed, then stood in the meadow and looked way off.

Tamara put down the magazine she'd been reading. Ginger and Kevin were playing Sorry on the living room rug. It wasn't cold, but Robert had built a fire in the fireplace anyway. The flames were loud and cheery.

Robert sat beside her on the couch and kissed her on the neck. "I'm going to kiss you every five minutes for the rest of your life."

"Can I have that in writing?"

"Hey, you know me well enough by now. After all we've been through?"

"We can get through anything as long as we stick together," she said. So maybe that was corny. She didn't care. It was true, whether dealing with otherworldly invasions or the stresses of everyday life.

"You still haven't told me about-"

"And I will, when the time's right. There are still a lot of things I need to figure out."

"I'm sorry for the way I acted. About the-”

“Gloomies. And being selfish.”

“And doubting you. And for… you know."

"Shhh. I know. You're only human, thank goodness." She touched him lightly on the head. "I understand. I've been there, remember?"

“Are you going to read my mind for the rest of my life?”

“That’s what wives do.”

She looked at Ginger. Her face was scrunched from concentrating on the game. Kevin was too old for Sorry, but he played because Ginger asked him. He was a good brother.

Tamara had been overloaded with powers after the explosion, almost as if shu-shaaa’s dying spirit had jumped into her head. And she'd been able to do all kinds of odd things. Reading minds was easy, she could handle that. It was the other stuff that scared her, like being able to move objects with her thoughts and making the tree branches bend a certain way and making the clouds gather in the sky. And she believed, though she never tried, that she could make the earth move a little faster in its orbit or the moon drop down for a good-night kiss.

And Tamara had sensed Ginger's powers, somehow a miniature, immature version of her own. No person should be so cursed. Nobody should have to see the future.

She didn't want Ginger to be followed around by Gloomies for the rest of her life. So she had sucked up those powers, vacuumed them out of the corners of Ginger's mind by a process she couldn't describe in a thousand psychology papers.

Ginger turned away from her game, smiled at Tamara, then took a drink of hot chocolate. Just a normal six-year-old girl. She picked up a crayon with two bare toes and put it to her mouth and bit it.

Well, maybe not TOO normal.

Tamara wished she could get rid of her own powers as easily. She didn't think she had the wisdom to wield them. She didn't think any mortal did.

But the powers were fading. Nothing lasted forever, and she now knew that was a good thing. What still bothered her was the lingering memory of the shu-shaaa’s dying cry.

Each night when Tamara closed her eyes and hunted for sleep, the cry haunted her. The cry was one of pain, an agony brought by understanding, because at the last, it had realized the destruction it had wrought on this world.

Just before the explosion, it had linked with Tamara and translated the strange pattern of human language and thought. It had finally understood the price of its own survival. And, in its alien way, it suffered regret. It had joined with Tamara and the others in that huge tidal wave of togetherness that had swept it to destruction.

The creature had accepted its death so that others might live.

In Tamara’s darkest hours, when Robert snored and the sheets were damp, she wondered if perhaps the alien had been more human than any of them.

Across the cosmos, in the nibbled edges of nebulae and Oort clouds and asteroid belts and white dwarves, shu-shaaa paused in its star grazing. The members felt a small prick as one of their collective died. There was no pain, only an emptiness that was quickly filled and forgotten.

They resumed their feeding.